How I track insider trading (and reasons why it beats the market)

I recently spoke to a friend who used to work at a hedge fund, and he shared a strategy for retail investors that institutional investors are unable to deploy. As known, insiders have a huge information advantage and their positioning can indicate their confidence in their own stock. While they can sell for many reasons (taxes, divorce, buying a boat), they only buy on the open market for one reason :) they think the stock is undervalued **How to Execute the Strategy** To turn this theory into a deployable strategy, I've created the following criteria to boost returns, but you can discover your own strategy. Criteria 1: Small caps Blue chip stocks will already have algorithms trading on this data, but anything under $500M in market cap will not have institutional/algorithm investors due to the liquidity constraint, but the smaller the better. A few sites will enable you to filter these trades by market cap of the company Criteria 2: Materiality The purchase must represent a meaningful portion of their net worth or salary. I filter for trades above $1M in value. I also filter for trades that increase their positioning >10%. Anything lower is just not material. The best signs are when the insider goes all-in on their own stock. No one without significant positive info will materially put their net worth and career all into the same basket. Criteria 3: Information asymmetry The best trades I have found are those where insiders have much more information than the public. So far, I've found Biotechnology and Gold companies to be the best. Biotech insiders will know interim data on their latest drugs before they are required to publish to market. Gold insiders know assay results or new discoveries. The best trade I made to-date has been Alumis Inc, where the chairman of the board has been adding $1.5mn every two weeks to his position. Immediately stood out among all the other trades, but it turned out that shares climbed from $5 to $25 in the following months with major news with their pharma pipeline. Criteria 4: The Cannibal Trait The company must be reducing its net share count by at least 2% to 3% annually. This confirms that management views the stock as undervalued relative to its intrinsic cash flows. Criteria 5: Aftermarket I found a major advantage in trading in the aftermarket for this type of transaction. Most insider trade reports occur in the evenings, after the market closes, but there's not enough liquidity for institutional investors to trade, so the price reaction is typically delayed until market open the next day. Prices took around a few hours to fully react, so I set up immediate alerts to get on the trade earlier. Even for the largest price reactions (+20% in a few hours), the price slowly rose so if you get in early, think there's alpha there too. Make sure to actually set alerts that you want on so that you don't get spammed with the thousands of trades per day though Overall, a key part of the trading strategy depends on trading the information asymmetry in microcap stocks or low liquidity environments, such that retail investors have an edge where the big algorithms cannot. Averaging a few thousand a week is enough for me but nowhere near what the institutions care about, which is why the alpha exists I put together a breakdown of the specific tools I use to track this: * The Tool: I use OpenInsider to look for trades and [browseSEC](http://browsesec.com/) can also filter by market cap, industry, and set up email alerts which I found helpful to refine further. both are free so no cost there * The Trap: Ignore option exerises. Only look for open market purchases and not tax filings or anything else. You want to see them reach into their pocket, not just receive a bonus. Anyone try anything similar or have improvements to the strategy?